Check the Facts for June 15

A lot of gray area surrounds the political rhetoric about the White House’s decision to swap Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl for five Taliban figures detained at Guantanamo.

Did the administration violate a decades-old policy of “not negotiating with terrorists”? Was it a simple swap of prisoners of war? And did President Obama violate the law by failing to notify appropriate congressional leaders of the deal 30 days in advance?

We set out to fact-check some of these issues and found the reality isn’t as clear as the rhetoric would lead you to believe. We’ll lay out some of the facts and let you draw your own conclusions.

In a Sunday show appearance, Sen. Ted Cruz said the Obama administration violated a decades-old policy of “not negotiating with terrorists” in the swap for Bergdahl.

Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, meanwhile, said that “we didn’t negotiate with terrorists,” describing the deal as a “normal process” for getting POWs home.

The question of whether the U.S. negotiated with terrorists begins, of course, with whether the Taliban is a terrorist organization. All five of the detainees in the exchange were members of the Afghan Taliban. And the Afghan Taliban is not on the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations.

In fact, the U.S. government had been trying for years to include the Afghan Taliban as part of the political reconciliation plan for Afghanistan. So if members of the Afghan Taliban are terrorists, the U.S. government had been negotiating with them for years.

But while the Afghan Taliban is not on the list of foreign terrorist organizations, the Pakistani Taliban, Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP), is. In 2010, the State Department added the Pakistani Taliban to the list, saying the group of Islamist militants has a “symbiotic relationship” with al-Qaida.

As a result, Mark Denbeaux, director of Seton Hall Law’s Center for Policy & Research, argues to us in an email, “negotiating a prisoner exchange with the Afghani Taliban does not constitute ‘negotiating with terrorists’ under current U.S. policy.”

Further complicating the issue is the fact that when Bergdahl left his post in Afghanistan’s Paktika province in June 2009 and fell into Taliban hands, the New York Times reports, “he was then moved across the border into the tribal areas of Pakistan, where he was held by the Haqqani network.”

In his comments, Cruz also claimed “the U.S. has had the policy for decades of not negotiating with terrorists.” Bruce Hoffman, director of Georgetown University’s Center for Security Studies, told USA TODAY that was “repeated as mantra more than fact. … We have long negotiated with terrorists. Virtually every other country in the world has negotiated with terrorists despite pledges never to.”

And then there’s the Iran-Contra affair, in which President Ronald Reagan approved the covert sale of arms to Iran in an attempt to free seven hostages being held in Lebanon by a group with Iranian ties.

Editor’s note: This Sunday feature will try to vet common misconceptions or false statements in the news. This week’s column comes from FactCheck.org, which is a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center. To read the entire column, go to FactCheck.org.